Milan 2014: architect Zaha Hadid has cantilevered a series of elongated strips of black granite to create a fluid storage unit for Italian brand CITCO.
Zaha Hadid lengthened the interconnected elements of the Tela Shelving for CITCO to make the heavy stone look as weightless as possible.
“Tela is a shelving system characterised by an interesting dichotomy: the solidity of the black granite of which it is composed seemingly dissipates with the elongated cantilevers,” said Hadid.
Shelves are connected to each other by sloping sections that support the cantilevers on both sides, so each of the three levels looks like a wavy line when viewed straight on.
This group of connections is offset from the centre of the unit and make the shelves appear to have been pulled up from a single flat piece of stone.
“At the centre of the configuration, its structural core, are the interweaved shelves which appear to open and unfold from a single surface to follow parallel trajectories,” Hadid said.
Avec près de 40 étages, cette tour incroyable est un projet imaginé par Zaha Hadid Architects et qui proposera pas moins de 780 chambres & suites. Prévue pour 2017, cette structure qui sera à coup sûr impressionnante se démarque et propose un aménagement à la hauteur de l’ambition de la ville de Macau, qui veut se présenter comme la ville des rêves.
News:Zaha Hadid Architects has unveiled images of a 40-storey hotel with an exposed exoskeleton that is under construction in Macau, China (+ movie).
The 780-room hotel was designed by Zaha Hadid Architects for property developer and casino specialist Melco Crown Entertainment. It will be located at the company’s flagship City of Dreams resort in Cotai, an area that takes its visual cues from the Las Vegas Strip.
Conceived as a monolithic block with a series of voids carved through its centre, the hotel will be encased behind a latticed structure.
It will contain 150,000 square metres of floor space, and will also contain meeting and event facilities, restaurants, a spa and an elevated swimming pool.
“The design combines dramatic public spaces and generous guest rooms with innovative engineering and formal cohesion,” said the architects in a statement.
The building will be Melco Crown’s fifth hotel in Macau which, like Hong Kong, is a Special Administrative Region of China.
Construction started on the building in 2013 and is set to be completed by 2017.
Here are some more details from Zaha Hadid Architects:
The Fifth Hotel of City of Dreams Macau
Melco Crown Entertainment, a developer and owner of casino gaming and entertainment resort facilities in Asia, has unveiled the project details and design of the fifth hotel tower at City of Dreams, the company’s flagship property in Cotai, Macau.
With 40 floors and a gross floor area of 150,000 square metres, the tower houses approximately 780 guestrooms, suites and sky villas. The hotel also includes a variety of meeting and event facilities, gaming rooms, lobby atrium, restaurants, spa, and sky pool. Including extensive back of house areas and supporting ancillary facilities, the tower’s design resolves the many complex programs for the hotel within a single cohesive envelope.
The design combines dramatic public spaces and generous guest rooms with innovative engineering and formal cohesion. The rectangular outline of the site is extruded as a monolithic block with a series of voids which carve through the its centre of the tower, merging traditional architectural elements of roof, wall and ceiling to create a sculptural form that defines many of the hotel’s internal public spaces.
The tower’s exposed exoskeleton reinforces the dynamism of the design. Expressive and powerful, this external structure optimises the interior layouts and envelops the building, further defining its formal composition and establishing relationships with the new Cotai strip.
Development of the new hotel at City of Dreams commenced in 2013. The project is expected to open in early 2017.
Stuart Weitzman commissioned architect Zaha Hadid to design a series of stores for his shoe label. This second branch is located in Hong Kong’s IFC shopping mall.
The boutique is surrounded by glass walls to maximise the exposure of the products in the busy retail environment. “The adaptive design of the IFC store expresses the dynamism of the city and reflects the quality and craftsmanship of Stuart Weitzman’s shoes,” said Hadid.
A large sculptural element extends from the walls and spans across the ceiling, then swoops down to create a niche in front of the glass walls for showcasing the shoes.
More footwear is displayed on a pair of freestanding metallic platforms with two levels, connected by fibrous elements that form the bases. Products also line the walls on thin shelves, which are subtly illuminated with hidden lighting.
Amongst the bustling 24-hour shopping district of South Korea‘s capital city, Zaha Hadid has completed a 38,000-square-metre cultural complex with a twinkling aluminium facade (+ movie).
Inaugurated on Friday, the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) by Zaha Hadid Architects provides Seoul with a hub for art, design and technology, plus a landscaped park that serves as a much-needed green oasis, and a public plaza linking the two.
The building features a shapely facade made up of 45,000 aluminium panels of varying sizes and curvatures. This was achieved using advanced 3-dimensional digital construction services, making DDP the first public building in Korea to utilise the technology.
Described by the designers as “a field of pixilation and perforation patterns”, the backlit facade is speckled with minute perforations that allow the building to transform from a solid entity by day into an animated light show by night.
“The design integrates the park and plaza seamlessly as one, blurring the boundary between architecture and nature in a continuous, fluid landscape,” said Zaha Hadid Architects in a statement.
The complex is made up of eight storeys, of which four sit above ground level and four are set below the plaza. Facilities include exhibition galleries, convention and seminar rooms, a design museum, and a library and education centre.
Voids puncturing the surface of the park offer a look down into the spaces below, and also allow daylight to permeate the building.
The building opened on 21 March to mark the start of Korean Fashion Week, but is also hosting five art and design exhibitions, alongside a collection of Korean art from the Kansong Art Museum.
Here’s the project description from Zaha Hadid Architects:
Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP)
The DDP has been designed as a cultural hub at the centre of Dongdaemun, a historic district of Seoul that is now renowned for its 24-hour shopping and cafes. DDP is a place for people of all ages; a catalyst for the instigation and exchange of ideas and for new technologies and media to be explored. The variety of public spaces within DDP include Exhibition Halls, Convention Halls, Design Museum, Library, Lab and Archives, Children’s Education Centre, Media Centre, Seminar Rooms and Sky Lounge; enabling DDP to present the widest diversity of exhibitions and events that feed the cultural vitality of the city.
The DDP is an architectural landscape that revolves around the ancient city wall and cultural artefacts discovered during archaeological excavations preceding DDP’s construction. These historic features form the central element of DDP’s composition; linking the park, plaza and city together.
The design is the very specific result of how the context, local culture, programmatic requirements and innovative engineering come together – allowing the architecture, city and landscape to combine in both form and spatial experience – creating a whole new civic space for the city.
The DDP Park is a place for leisure, relaxation and refuge – a new green oasis within the busy urban surroundings of Dongdaemun. The design integrates the park and plaza seamlessly as one, blurring the boundary between architecture and nature in a continuous, fluid landscape. Voids in the park’s surface give visitors glimpses into the innovative world of design below, making the DDP an important link between the city’s contemporary culture, emerging nature and history.
The 30,000 square metre park reinterprets the spatial concepts of traditional Korean garden design: layering, horizontality, blurring the relationship between the interior and the exterior – with no single feature dominating the perspective. This approach is further informed by historic local painting traditions that depict grand visions of the ever-changing aspects of nature.
DDP encourages many contributions and innovations to feed into each other; engaging the community and allowing talents and ideas to flourish. In combination with the city’s exciting public cultural programs, DDP is an investment in the education and inspiration of future generations.
DDP’s design and construction sets many new standards of innovation. DDP is the first public project in Korea to implement advanced 3-dimensional digital construction services that ensure the highest quality and cost controls. These include 3-dimensional Building Information Modelling (BIM) for construction management and engineering coordination, enabling the design process to adapt with the evolving client brief and integrate all engineering requirements.
These innovations have enabled the team building DDP to control the construction with much greater precision than conventional processes and improve efficiencies. Implementing such construction technologies make DDP one of Korea’s most innovative and technological advanced constructions to date.
DDP opens to the public on 21 March 2014 by hosting Korean Fashion Week. DDP will also host five separate design and art exhibitions featuring works by modern designers as well as the prized collection of traditional Korean art of the Kansong Art Museum.
This week Patrik Schumacher took to Facebook to decry the state of architecture as both a discipline and a discourse. Quickly filling his timeline, he scolded “critics and critical architects” for their agnosia, or form blindness.
“This [visual condition] is involved in the critic’s inability to grasp the significance of parametricism,” he wrote, aghast at the lack of appreciation of a high period of organic form derived from computational inputs. An hour later he continued his imperatives, writing “STOP political correctness in architecture. But also: STOP confusing architecture and art. Architects are in charge of the FORM of the built environment, not its content.”
Although the contents of Schumacher’s Facebook wall almost immediately went viral, it should go without saying that his personal comments posted on his own social media profile were not exactly new insight into the worldview of Zaha Hadid‘s first in command.
I caught him covering this ground at the Politics of Parametricism conference organised by CalArts‘ MA Aesthetics & Politics program back in November, where from the back of the auditorium he took up the mic and launched into an extended commentary (some might say mansplain) directed at panelists Laura Kurgan, Peggy Deamer, and Teddy Cruz. In her earlier talk, Deamer had critiqued the neoliberal ideology behind parametricism, and suggested that the fixation on computation “leaves behind the actual worker at almost every level: architect, fabricator, engineer, constructor.”
One can only guess that this latest round of remarks from Schumacher were triggered belatedly by the tongue-lashing the firm received over the design of the Al Wakrah stadium for the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar and Hadid’s disavowal of architectural responsibly for migrant worker deaths. (Although Hadid’s remarks were trounced for their glibness, her shrugging off of responsibility onto the Qatari government underscores the relatively tiny amount of agency the architect, even the most powerful ones, shoulders in these conditions.)
Schumacher’s commentary, which continued all day, ending in a summary document and the reposting of related news items, coincided with day two of TED 2014. My Twitter feed documented the both in real time and with parallel emphasis as if they were conjoined twins. As I watched the missives go by, the paired events allowed for a reflection on the current media models filling our bandwidths: the TED Talk and the Rant. The two are uncanny in their dark symmetry. They are fuelled by access, personality, and true belief and leave little room for complexity, failure, or doubt.
TED Talks also recently faced criticism for their packaged, twenty-minute doses of future-forward cool, with a side of heartwarming humanism. “”Buildings don’t just reflect our society; they shape our societies.” @marchitizer #TED2014,” tweeted John Cary, the quote, an aphoristic snippet of Marc Kushner’s TED presentation, a spry ying to Schumacher’s yang.
Architecture has always had its share of provocative statements. Walter Gropius in the Bauhaus Manifesto (1919) suggested, not unlike Kushner’s optimistic TED Talk, that the built synthesis of art and architecture will “one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.” While in 1980, Coop Himmelb(l)au took the opposite approach, concluding the practice’s manifesto with the decisive phrase: “Architecture must blaze.” (And, indeed, Schumacher presented his own Parametricist Manifesto in 2008.)
But the rant is something quite different from the manifesto. The rant is a privilege. Ranting is a spectator sport, which means it is predicated on the status of the ranter. You need to know someone is looking in order to publicly tantrum. To wit, when Wolf Prix needed to air a grievance regarding 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, he issued a press release entitled “The Banal.”
As perversely delectable as it is to watch star architects froth and whine as if in an episode of Real Housewives, the spectacle is just as calculated.
“There has never been a feedback loop for architecture until now, and that changes everything,” read a tweet, quoting Kushner’s TED Talk. A bit of a headscratcher, the decontextualised phrase makes more sense when applied to architectural discourse online.
The TED Talk and the Rant are two poles in a closed loop system. A TED talk may say all the right things and a rant may say all the wrong things, but in this digital environment, neither takes risks.
Schumacher’s Facebook posts, then, despite their volubility and tenuous grasp on the rules of punctuation and capitalisation, do pose an important point, although not one he may want to claim. There is a desperate need for more architects (and critics) to argue a position and to engage in more debate, not simply preach or provoke. And, despite arguing the contrary, his comments underscore the fact that architecture is indeed political.
Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based journalist and critic. She covers art, architecture, urbanism and design for a number of publications includingThe New York Times, Domus, Dwell, and Architect, where she is a contributing editor. Zeiger is author of New Museums, Tiny Houses and Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature. She is currently adjunct faculty in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center. Zeiger also is editor and publisher of loud paper, a zine and blog dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse.
News: director of Zaha Hadid Architects Patrik Schumacher has taken to Facebook to launch an attack on political correctness in architecture and a perceived trend for prioritising art over form-making.
In a post this morning, Schumacher accused the judges of the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale of being motivated by a “misguided political correctness” and said that architects need to “stop confusing architecture and art”.
“Architects are in charge of the form of the built environment, not its content,” said Schumacher.
“We need to grasp this and run with this despite all the (ultimately conservative) moralizing political correctness that is trying to paralyse us with bad conscience and arrest our explorations if we cannot instantly demonstrate a manifest tangible benefit for the poor – as if the delivery of social justice is the architect’s competency.”
An installation documenting the Torre David vertical slum in Caracas won the Golden Lion award for the best project at the last biennale, which was curated by David Chipperfield. Best pavilion was awarded to the Toyo Ito-curated Japanese pavilion, which focused on alternative housing concepts for the homes that were destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
Two weeks ago, Zaha Hadid responded to questions about migrant worker deaths in Qatar, where her stadium is currently under construction, by saying that architects have nothing to do with the workers. “It’s not my duty as an architect to look at it,” said Hadid.
“STOP political correctness in architecture. But also: STOP confusing architecture and art.
“Architects are in charge of the FORM of the built environment, not its content. We need to grasp this and run with this despite all the (ultimately conservative) moralizing political correctness that is trying to paralyse us with bad conscience and arrest our explorations if we cannot instantly demonstrate a manifest tangible benefit for the poor – as if the delivery of social justice is the architect’s competency.
“Unfortunately all the prizes given by the last architecture biennale where motivated by this misguided political correctness. STOP political correctness in architecture! And yet, architecture is not a l’art pour l’art discipline. Architecture is NOT ART although FORM is our specific contribution to the evolution of world society.
“We need to understand how new forms can make a difference for the progress of world civilisation. I believe today this implies the intensification of communicative interaction with a heightened sense of being connected within a complex, variegated spatial order where all spaces resonate and communicate with each other via associative logics.”
News:architects have “nothing to do with the workers” who have died on construction sites in Qatar, according to Zaha Hadid, whose Al Wakrah stadium for the FIFA World Cup 2022 is under construction in the gulf state.
Over 500 Indian migrants and 382 Nepalese nationals have died in the country since it won the right to host the football tournament, according to an investigation into conditions in the Qatari construction industry by British newspaper The Guardian, prompting an outcry from human rights groups across the world.
“It’s not my duty as an architect to look at it,” Hadid said yesterday at the reopening for her Olympic aquatics centre in London. “I cannot do anything about it because I have no power to do anything about it. I think it’s a problem anywhere in the world. But, as I said, I think there are discrepancies all over the world.”
Hadid‘s Al Wakrah stadium is one of five new venues under construction for the tournament but the architect says it is the responsibility of the Qatari government not architects to address issues relating to worker deaths.
“I have nothing to do with the workers,” she said. “I think that’s an issue the government – if there’s a problem – should pick up. Hopefully, these things will be resolved.”
Asked if she was concerned about the deaths, Hadid commented: “Yes, but I’m more concerned about the deaths in Iraq as well, so what do I do about that? I’m not taking it lightly but I think it’s for the government to look to take care of.”
The 40,000-seat stadium is currently under construction in Al Wakrah. Its curvaceous form was based on a type of Arabian fishing boat, but the design came under fire shortly after release when critics compared it to a vagina.
These photographs show the newly converted aquatics centre by Zaha Hadid Architects for the London 2012 Olympics, which will open to the public next week without the controversial wings that housed additional seating during the Games.
Now configured as it was originally designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, the temporary stands constructed for the Olympic and Paralympic Games have been removed and replaced with glazing that fills the space between the spectator stands and the roof.
In its new “legacy mode,” the centre accommodates 2500 seats for future events including the 2014 World Diving Series and 2016 European Swimming Championships.
Two boxy temporary wings housing 15,000 temporary seats that were tacked onto either side of the building when it was originally opened ahead of the Games were removed in May last year.
In a statement released ahead of the centre’s reopening on 1 March, mayor of London Boris Johnson said: “After a post-Olympic makeover, London’s majestic aquatics centre is now flinging open its doors for everyone to enjoy, whether an elite athlete or enthusiastic amateur.”
“All of the world-class sporting venues on the magnificent Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park have secured bright futures, dispelling fears of white elephants and helping to drive our ambitious regeneration plans for east London,” Johnson added.
Aquatics centre in Olympic mode showing temporary seating
A diving pool, competition pool and training pool are arranged in a line along the centre of the building, with the training pool housed under Stratford City Bridge on the edge of the Olympic Park.
The centre’s internal layout remains largely unchanged, but daylight now enters the space through expansive glass surfaces replacing the banked seating that rose from behind the permanent stands.
As well as prestigious international events, the venue will also provide community facilities for swimming and diving lessons, fitness and family sessions, water polo, synchronised swimming, diving, triathlon, sub aqua, gym and dry diving.
London studios Grimshaw, Haworth Tompkins and Marks Barfield Architects also made the shortlist to recreate the “spirit, scale and magnificence” of the iron glass and steel structure that was designed by English architect Paxton to host the Great Exhibition of 1851, but was destroyed by fire in 1936.
Backed by Chinese developer the ZhongRong Group, the new exhibition venue will provide the centrepiece of a wider masterplan for the overhaul of the surrounding 80-hectare park.
Possible reconstruction view
“This is a stellar line-up of talent demonstrating the worldwide interest in this unique and challenging project,” said London mayor Boris Johnson, who is chairing the judging panel.
“The rebuild of The Crystal Palace is set to produce an extraordinary new landmark for the capital, which will support the rebirth of this historic park and catalyse jobs and growth in the local area,” he added.
Up to three of the shortlisted firms will be invited to prepare concept designs later this year. An overall winner will be announced shortly after and construction of the chosen scheme could start in late 2015.
Ni Zhaoxing of ZhongRong Group commented: “The expressions of interest and outstanding shortlist demonstrate the wealth and diversity of design talent inspired by the challenge of rebuilding the Crystal Palace in the spirit of the magnificent original.”
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